


Euphorbia

by JoAsakura



Series: The Language of Memory [9]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-21
Updated: 2016-08-21
Packaged: 2018-08-10 01:15:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7824448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoAsakura/pseuds/JoAsakura
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gabriel and the team rally to save Jack.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Euphorbia

Geneva, the Overwatch Memorial Museum.

"Site control, check in." Ana scowled through her scope at the growing tide of military and news vehicles on the horizon.

"North access road, walled off." Mei giggled in her earpiece, only to be cut off by Junkrat.

"Me an' Roadie got the south access road, lookin' like a tire fire, Granny." He chirped, as Mei launched into a tirade in Mandarin at him.

"Off road routes covered." Torbjorn shouted over them. "Me an' the talking turret got it."

Ana rolled her good eye. "Pharah, air control?"

"We're going to be under heavy fire in under an hour. There's only so much D.Va and I can do to control the kind of situation that's going to be flying in with minimal casualties. Perhaps we might consider giving Bastion wings for next time we take over a major landmark?"

There was a string of excited beeps in reply and Ana groaned. "We'll talk to Winston about it, Bastion. Site crew, check in."

"Civilians are clear." Zarya said briskly. "Lucio and The Omnic are ensuring their route to safety."

"Nothing is getting in or out, my dear." Reinhardt added.

"We're a go. Symmetra, bring down the house. Hanzo, light it up." Ana trained her scope on the gleaming white building. The statue of Jack in the courtyard, young and smiling at nothing, made her heart hurt. "GO."

"The building was donated by Vishkar after the dissolution of Overwatch." Symmetra said as she danced a pattern, dissolving walls and floors, even as trophies and artifacts were carefully set down. "It's a beautiful example of the first wave hard light architecture."

"Admire later, find basement access now." Ana followed the flicker of new motion as a series of arrows began to pepper the now-open site. "Hanzo."

"These only have a limited range." The archer grumbled. "But... There, you should be seeing the telemetry."

"Reaper?" Ana scowled at the fresh data. "We've got movement, they're waiting for us. You ready?"

"Looks like they didn't change much of the substructure from when we ran Blackwatch." Reaper's modulated voice shivered in her ear. "I know where to go. Let's give them what they want."

"You heard the man, people. This is our house, let's take it back." Ana barked into the comms. "Genji?"  
The only reply was the flare of green as Genji's dragon coiled around him, moments before the once-hidden door shattered under his blade.

~~

"DEATH HAS COME FOR JACK MORRISON." The wraith roared in the corridor, bullets passing through his shuddering shape as his own shotguns roared, bullet after bullet finding it's mark in the heads of the Talon soldiers swarming towards him.

It had once been a Blackwatch vehicle bay, hidden under where Overwatch's hangar had once stood, and the walls lit up with defense turrets. "DEATH LAUGHS AT YOUR DEFENSES!" There might have been the slightest drawl to the heavily modulated voice.

Thousands of yards away in the ventilation tunnels, a cloud of black smoke rippled past the flickering lights of the grates for the rooms below. "Oh come on. I do not sound like that." It hissed into a comm tucked into the roiling mass.

"DEATH IS TAKING HEAVY FIRE AND WOULD REALLY LIKE SOME FUCKING BACKUP." Reaper yelled at no one in particular as he lay down a barrage of return fire.

"You absolutely do sound like that, you colossal drama queen." Ana sniped back from her perch. "Symmetra, how long can you hold that hard light construct?"

"Not long with the fire McCree is taking. I didn't expect..." The architect sounded concerned. "I... Building inanimate objects is very different than something... Lively. He maybe has five minutes if they stop shooting at him, but I can't..."

"Don't worry about it, you're doing great." Ana comforted her. "Reaper?"

"I know where I'm going. I'm at the control center and.." Gabriel flowed into the empty room, monitors showing the scene of Reaper mowing down Talon agents and turrets alike in the entrance. "It's empty. Whoever was running the show must've rabbited with the civilians upstairs." He growled, tearing out the controls for the turrets. "I'd bet bottom dollar this place is rigged to explode, but I'm not seeing any timers." Gabriel attached a remote unit to the main. "Winston?"

Sirens were still going off and over the monitors, Gabriel could see more troops. Loyal to Talon to the end, he thought miserably. "Jesse, you've got more company coming. WINSTON..?!?"

"I'm on it." Winston's voice crackled over the comms. "Go, find Jack. I got this."

Gabriel growled, watching the hard-light illusion Jesse wore shatter under the dogpile of Talon agents. He froze, torn for an interminable moment between abandoning his former protege and finding Jack, until the screen lit up with a blinding blue.

He didn't need the sound on to know that Hanzo had arrived. A moment later the building shook violently under the assault of the twin storm dragons.

There was something to this new Overwatch after all, he thought, sliding back into the ventilation system.

~~

Gabriel was grateful they'd kept the basic layout of the facility. Blackwatch's main levels had avoided the worst of the bomb that had leveled the upper buildings, and he could still see in the back of his mind where medical was, where the conference rooms were..

Where the holding cells were.

In one, lit with a bank of blinding halogen lights, he saw Jack through the slatted vent. Pale skin bruised and burnt and peppered with cuts and needle marks, an unhealthy blue to his lips. They'd left him bound in a stress position, and dark blood caked at his ears and nose. One eye was swollen shut and Gabriel shuddered, looking at the blood on the implements beside him. They'd left him naked, and despite his still-solid shape, he looked terrifyingly fragile.

The eyes of the Reaper searched for prey in that room, and Jack didn't register in his senses. Anger and fear bubbled up inside of him, and for a moment, all Gabriel saw was red as he flowed into the room in a choking black tide. Two guards for a dying man and one was down, head nearly torn off, before Gabriel had even fully re-formed. He didn't even bother manifesting his own weapons, taking the first guard's gun and unloading into the face of the second. Winston was silent in his comms on the matter of the potential bomb, and he couldn't believe there weren't more soldiers on the way.

With a growl, he discarded the empty pistol and crouched beside Jack, tendrils of sooty fog delicately caressing him as Gabriel clawed apart the bonds. "Jack. Cornfed, come on, Baby. You talked me back in Mercy's lab." He said quickly, dissolving his mask back into his mass. There was a pulse, and a faint flutter of breath. "You are tougher than this, you decrepit son of a bitch and you are *not* leaving me all alone with the fucking Junior Varsity out there." Gabriel's voice rose with a touch of panic as he shook Jack as hard as he dared. "I don't have lungs, Jack, you gotta breathe, baby."

The building shook again, and he prayed it was the Shimada Dragons again and not something worse as he gently gathered Jack to his chest. His fingers were blue and his wrists and ankles were raw. "Are you real?" Jack whispered suddenly, the words little more than a rasp of breath.

"I'm real, Jackie. I'm real." Gabriel cradled him, rocking them both for a moment. "Fuck."

"You're late. Was there a sale at Hot Topic you couldn't wait for?" Jack wheezed, sagging into Gabriel's shifting mass as the latter tried to stand him up.

"Pendejo." Gabriel said with total fondness, a shotgun swirling into his hand. Two quick shots at the frame and the door fell outward with a clang. The corridor was empty. "Thank you, Jesus." He muttered, limping Jack out of the room.

"Give me a gun." Jack rasped at him. "You shoot two handed, and you can't, holding me up."

"Yes, let me give the half-blind old man who can't even hold himself upright a weapon." Gabriel mused as they made their way down the corridor. "That's a great idea, Jackie. Don't know why I didn't think of it."

"Give me a fucking gun, Gabriel, and we have to find Amelie." Jack slumped, dead weight, until Gabriel made a long groan of unhappiness.

"You know, she shot you so she could get back in good with them." Gabriel spun a second shotgun into life and pressed it into Jack's hands, watching the other man fight the tremors in his grip.

"I figured. But I heard them talking, they're going to recondition her. We have to find her before they finish." Jack found the safety by touch and let Gabe guide him along.

"Look at you and all these second chances. I thought 76 was a cynical asshole." Gabriel forced a note of humour into his voice, the chatter in the comms distressingly silent.

"Maybe I just started to remember what hope felt like." Jack muttered against Gabriel's shoulder. "She's probably in medical."

"We're here." Gabriel peered into the darkened lab, Widowmaker's slender blue form floating in a bubbling tank. "And so is she. I have no idea how this shit works, Jack."

Jack's shotgun rang out beside them with a single, deafening blast, and Gabriel watched as the tank shattered, flooding the room with faintly luminescent goo and a a single, naked assassin. "Jesus Christ, that is such a fucking Morrison plan." Gabriel spat as he left Jack propped against the doorway, flowing into the room to check on Widowmaker.

She coughed out a lungful of breathing liquid and glared at him, yellow eyes glowing faintly in the dim room. "Reyes." She finally said, then glanced past him at Jack. "Why are you wasting your time with me, get yourselves out of here!" She coughed angrily.

"You're one of us." Jack said from the doorway. "Can you move?"

"Yes. I wasn't going to give them the satisfaction of my mind back. I was prepared to die before I became their toy again." She laughed bitterly as Gabriel helped her to her feet, then her smile softened. "Go on. I can make my own way out of here. I'll cover you if you run into trouble."

~~

There was an old synchronicity to their movements as they made their way back up to the entrance levels. One shot from Gabriel, one from Jack, the latter tracking his shots by the echoes of Gabe's. In the distance, the rapid chatter of automatic fire and screams - and Gabriel did not want to know where Amelie had found a weapon.

"Vishkar." Jack said as the last shots died out. "They're part of it.They're gonna try and destroy us, Gabe."

"Maybe it's time we finally retired, then. Got a little place in Greece like you always wanted." Gabriel huffed a laugh as he caught sight of Jesse, jabbing a Talon operative with his toe. The former vehicle bay was a smoking wreck of carnage.

"Do you really believe that?" Jack buried his face against Gabriel's neck for a moment as black smoke coiled around him. Gabriel knew from old experience that Jack wouldn't want them seeing him like he was, fragile and naked and battered. The black settled on him like a second skin, hiding the worst of what they had done to him.

"Nah." Gabriel pulled his mask out of the shadows, shaping one for Jack as well. It was something, at least. "Just wanted to see what you'd say."

"Thank god, Winston and Ana been yellin' on the comms fer the two of you fer like twenty minutes." Jesse jogged up to them, the archer close behind him.

Gabriel reached for his ear. "Son of a bitch, I lost it somewhere back in holding." He growled as Jack swatted Jesse's fussing hands away.

"Sitrep, McCree." Jack rumbled, standing unsteadily on his own.

"He got the bomb defused, but we got UN forces up the wazoo out there. He's tryin' to mine what's left of Talon's data but he needs more time." Jesse said quickly. "Pharah an' D.Va already had'ta retreat, we're gonna lose this place real soon."

Jack looked back at Gabriel, face unreadable under the new mask. "I know how to give him time." He took Jesse's comm and tapped it. "Symmetra, Lucio, I need a soundstage ASAP."

~~

In the empty space that had once housed the Overwatch Memorial, at the base of Strike Commander Jack Morrison, smiling blankly up at the sky, an old man in black limped slowly towards the storm of a million flashing cameras as the UN forces and news teams alike descended on the now undefended site.

Silently, he took off the mask and a collective gasp rippled through the crowd, louder even than the helicopters overhead.

"My name is Jack Morrison." He began in a slow, rasping voice. "In another life, this was my home. This was my pride. Overwatch was my everything." He looked out at the mass of people. "We were supposed to protect the peace this world fought so hard to achieve. We ultimately... I ultimately failed you. In my pride, in my ego."

A murmur ran through the crowd as a rippling cloud of black smoke joined him, and the Reaper pulled off his own, bone-white mask. Jack let his hand brush Gabriel's before continuing. "I was blinded to the truth. That we had never been meant to succeed. I didn't listen when it mattered to the people I should have, and instead, to those who had always wanted us to fail. Corporations and politicians who want to mold the world into their own fiefdoms. And now we're on the cusp of a second Omnic Crisis, the world is on the edge of chaos that they're sowing to try again."

Jack paused, looking away, as if hearing another voice. Slowly, men and women began to join them in front of the statue. Human, Omnic, cyborg. "We will bring you the truth. We will not fail you." Jack lifted his chin. "I stand here with my teammates to tell you all, we are defying the Petras Act. We are back. We are different, and we are reborn. PEOPLE OF THE WORLD, WE ARE OVERWATCH, AND WE WILL NOT FAIL YOU." He raised his fist, joined a second later by Gabriel, and then the others.

In the next moment, the soldiers shook off the shock as they struggled to reach them under the rush of the reporters, but the hard-light construct shuddered and burst under their hands, leaving nothing behind.

~~

In the shaking transport, Jack collapsed against Gabriel's chest, coughing and trembling. "How'd I do?"

Symmetra smiled, just a little, as she collapsed the soundstage, sharing a little nod with Lucio.

"I forgot how good you were at making speeches, Jack." Ana gently touched his face as Gabriel supported him. Nearby, Widowmaker sat wrapped in Jesse's serape, curled up in the shadow of Roadhog's massive bulk. They were all jittery, nervous, but they were all alive. They were all here.

They had all come for him. In Gabriel's embrace, he felt humbled.

"It's my superpower." He wheezed a laugh, and looked at the rest of the gathered team crowded into the cargo hold. "I would have understood if you'd all chosen not to be a part of that. We're all criminals now."

Reinhardt twirled his helmet in his gigantic, armoured hands, and glanced around the hold. "No." He said, taking in the faces of their gathered friends. "You had it right in your speech, Jack."

Jack could feel Gabriel's smile, too big and too toothy for comfort, against his shoulder.

"We're Overwatch." Gabriel rumbled. "Every last one of us, and this is gonna be a hell of a thing."

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you everyone!


End file.
